“Jihadism in the West and the Predicament of Domestic Counter-terrorism” - Jytte Klausen

ABOUT THE TALK

The Jihadist movement that Bin Laden built targets the West as the “far enemy.” Yet Jihadism is deeply penetrated by Western thinking and exploits Western freedoms and technologies to build a global organization. The Internet and social media networking technologies have widened its reach and transformed its recruitment base. Western governments struggle to respond, but their strategies are often counter-productive, secrecy and surveillance trumping an open public discourse.

In 2006 Klausen founded the Western Jihadism Project, which aims to develop an evidence-based approach to Islamist terrorist movement in the West. Her presentation will draw on the findings of the Project.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She writes about the welfare state, immigration, Church-State relations and free speech dilemmas. Her most recent books are The Cartoons That Shook the World (Yale University Press 2009), which is about the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the worldwide protests that followed their publication, and The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (Oxford University Press 2005, pb. 2007), which was translated into German and Turkish. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The New Revolutionaries about Western Muslims in Bin Laden’s movement.

Klausen has a PhD from the New School for Social Research (1992) and a BA and MA from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 2007 she received the Carnegie Scholars’ Award for research on the integration of Muslim faith communities in Europe. She was a British Academy Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University (2003), and a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin (2004). She has written for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and other national and international outlets, and she is a regular commentator on the BBC, Voice of America, and other U.S. and international media.